


Vocabulary Lesson and Other Stories: A Third Anniversary Celebration of Sad Children

by Randomcat1832



Series: NWABBW Universe [3]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: As usual Sans can't catch a break, But he gets some nice things too, Child Experimentation, Family Fluff, Female Frisk (Undertale), Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jesus god i've been writing this fic for three years, NWABBW Universe, NWABBW bonus chapters, NWABBW shorts, Nothing we're not used to though, Part of another fic, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-Undertale Pacifist Route - "I want to stay with you.", Sad Children, and it's not even over yet, enjoy it while it lasts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 08:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24966577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randomcat1832/pseuds/Randomcat1832
Summary: Young Sans summons his courage to ask Gaster a question, Frisk has a surprise in store, and Alphys comes to an important revelation.A collection of responses to drabble prompts set in the NWABBW universe and put together for the fic's third anniversary, now posted a very fashionable two months late after the actual anniversary.
Relationships: Alphys & Sans (Undertale), Frisk & Sans (Undertale), W. D. Gaster & Sans
Series: NWABBW Universe [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1416442
Comments: 23
Kudos: 44





	1. This is Why I Don't Make Promises

**Author's Note:**

> With special thanks to [det395](https://archiveofourown.org/users/det395/pseuds/det395) for the title idea, for without her I'd probably have ended up being lazy and calling this something boring like NWABBW Third Anniversary Drabble Collection. Clickbait, y'know?
> 
> **From leafletp on tumblr** : I’m here for my angst prescription please: It hasn’t been established if Sans ever actually saw Frisk die. So, Prompt: Sans sees Frisk die during her adventure. And come back. And die again. Or, if he never actually sees it, he comes to the realization that the loads he keeps feeling is because the child is being killed, over and over.

He’d been unsettled when he felt that first Reload, back before the kid had even exited the Ruins. It was a powerful Reload, too. It left Sans’s head throbbing for a while afterward, not that it really surprised him very much. The kid was powerful, and time being jolted back with that much force—even only by a few minutes—should be enough to produce a real _skull-banger_.

Just a kid. That was what Sans had a hard time wrapping his head around. He’d always known that the humans who fell down here, whose souls had been claimed, had been children. There was even a funny sort of logic to it. Kids were resilient, and it made sense their Determination would be especially potent. 

But that was the science of it, and it was science that Sans was familiar with. It was quite another thing to _see_ the kid, to talk, tease and share fries with her. He’d always thought that an anomaly with the power to rewrite time itself would be kind of creepy—knowing smiles and unblinking eyes and a low, whispery voice. Like those kids you saw in human horror movies. But this kid was too _normal_.

The kid was an anomaly. The same kid who looked at him with a goofy, toothy grin and giggled at his puns and got distracted by pebbles on the side of the road and stopped to splash in puddles and was nice to Papyrus—god, she’d even eaten his spaghetti, and not even Sans loved his brother enough to do that. That kid was the most powerful being the Underground had ever seen. That kid could bend time to her will, could rip a tear in the fabric of reality. She’d already started, and she didn’t even know she was doing it.

The kid had left Alphys’s lab a little while ago, and Sans had just taken a shortcut from his favourite cavern in Waterfall—a quiet place, good for thinking—to his hot dog stand. If all went well, the kid would reach him soon enough.

Sans took a swig from one of his ketchup bottles before stowing it back with the rest of the condiments.

He spotted one of his regulars, a Vulkin who sometimes brewed coffee in their crater in exchange for a hot dog, toddling over to him, beaming. The coffee was usually undrinkable—taste too ashy—but they tried their best. Sans lifted a hand in a wave and—

—a jolt in spacetime. He surged awake in the secluded Waterfall cavern. 

Instinctively, Sans glanced at his watch, even though he knew that time couldn’t have jumped back very far; he’d barely spent ten minutes in Waterfall. That made, what, six Reloads since the kid had arrived? Seven? Mentally, Sans chastised himself. It was important to keep track of these things. He needed to track the kid’s movements, figure out what she was doing, even it meant he was treating her like… like a science experiment, he thought with resignation.

But, he reminded himself, this was important. He needed to know what the kid was up to, but so far, he really didn’t have any idea. She only ever Reloaded by a few minutes each time. She seemed dead set on getting out of the Underground, but it wasn’t like she was going to be able to accomplish that without a monster soul, and she seemed equally fixated on not hurting anyone—Sans had checked to be sure, _many_ times.

The Reloads… 

The terrible realisation was rushing at him, and Sans’s mind reeled, bracing itself for impact.

The kid didn’t have a ton of HP going for her, and it was a wonder she’d managed to stay alive this long with so many monsters attacking her, even with healing items on hand. Unless, of course, she hadn’t.

Sans hadn’t seen the kid fight Undyne, but he’d felt three full Reloads right around then. The timing was right.

The kid had died. Kept dying, probably would keep dying. And then she’d come back, simply because she had the stubborn will to come back.

And it had happened on his watch.

His first thought was the Void. He thought of time ripping itself open every time the kid died. He had no idea how much damage the kid had caused, but if one small Reload had been enough for the machine to break, it was probably bad.

His second thought was the woman.

Sans closed his eyes, letting out a deep breath. He rarely made promises, and even more rarely did he made promises he intended to keep. Leave it to him to break this one, when the stakes were high, when a little kid had died—was dying, would keep dying—on his watch. Or maybe he was just out of practice.

It was stupid, really. There was no way he could _really_ protect a human kid. Not a kid who didn’t have it in her to defend herself. No point in feeling guilty about something you were powerless to change.

That was stupid, too. He might not be very good at keeping promises, but he sure as hell knew how to dodge the blame.

Sans dropped down onto a rock and buried his face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said to the empty air, and he didn’t know if he was talking to the woman or the kid.


	2. Apostrophe-Dog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **From leafletp** : Fluffy prompt: Frisk takes Sans to show him actual hotdogs, or takes Papyrus to try legit spaghetti

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally going to be about Frisk taking Papyrus to try real spaghetti at an Italian restaurant, because I wanted to show a little love for Papyrus when I really haven’t written for him very much at all in the NWABBW universe. But Papyrus is hard to write for and I kept getting stuck, and I’ve always been most comfortable writing in Sans’s voice anyway. Maybe one day I'll have the power to capture Papyrus's greatness in words, but today is not that day.

The hot dog stand is always there on the edge of the park—not the little parkette by the house, with the rickety benches and the lonely metal slide that Frisk says is too hot to slide down when it’s sunny, but the big park downtown. Sometimes there are food trucks lined up along the sidewalk, selling fries and grilled cheese and ice cream sandwiches and fancy cinnamon rolls and something called empanadas that Sans can’t get enough of. The hot dog stand is the only constant, but even though it seems to be a monster-friendly establishment, Sans has yet to try it. 

It’s nothing like the illegal hot dog stand he ran in the Underground. In appearance, the hot dog stand is a boxy steel contraption on wheels, with nothing but a red-and-white umbrella to keep the vendor out of the shade, and there’s no snow permanently fixed to the umbrella either. It’s July now, and summer on the Surface isn’t nearly as hot as Hotland, but Frisk informs him that there are parts of the world that get a lot hotter than this. Their part of the Surface doesn’t get much in the way of extreme temperatures, she says.

Sans also gets the feeling that the hot dogs themselves don’t have any resemblance to the ones he used to sell in the Underground. The smell wafting from the cart is powerful, and more importantly wrong, and he remembers the kid saying something about his ’dogs tasting weird. It turns out humans make their hot dogs out of meat—but not dog meat, or cat meat either, for that matter—except for the ones who don’t want meat, and the fake-meat hot dogs aren’t made of water sausages either, which is confusing.

“So what are the fake-meat ones made of then, if they’re not made outta water sausages?” he asked the kid once, who just shrugged.

But even though the hot dog cart itself is fundamentally different from Sans’s old repurposed sentry station in Hotland, seeing monsters and humans flock toward it for ’dogs (never ’cats) slathered in ketchup and mustard and relish leaves a faint pang of nostalgia in his soul.

Sans isn’t sure what’s been keeping him from trying out the human hot dogs, but he supposes he shouldn’t _really_ be surprised when Frisk asks him—more accurately, wheedles him—to take her to the park.

Sans supervises from a nearby bench as the kid runs around on the playground equipment for a bit. Usually she plays here with Papyrus, or with her friend Monster Kid from up the street, but today she’s alone, and even as Frisk climbs on top of the monkey bars just to hurtle herself off of them—just because she can, Sans supposes—it’s notably half-hearted.

So it isn’t _really_ a surprise when Frisk comes sprinting over to him, a little winded from her latest leap off the top of the monkey bars yet still somehow bouncing with energy, and begins tugging him in the direction of the food trucks.

“What’s on your mind, bud?” he asks, as Frisk tugs at the sleeve of his hoodie.

“It’s a surprise!” Frisk peeks over her shoulder at him, positively beaming.

“We gettin’ something to eat?”

“I can’t tell you; it’s a surprise!”

Sans shakes his head. The kid is totally lacking in subtlety, probably on account of the fact that she’s literally eight, but he doesn’t want to disappoint her. He opts to play along.

“You want an ice cream sandwich?” 

“I’m not ruining the surprise!”

So Sans lets the kid tug him further along, until finally she stops in front of the hot dog cart. She drops his sleeve and takes a step forward, gesturing toward the hot dog cart with dramatic flair worthy of Papyrus.

Not for the first time, Sans breaks into an easy grin as he finds himself floored affection for this kid. Save Papyrus, he’s never found it this easy to smile around anyone before— _really_ smile, and he does it often. It’s a strange feeling, one that almost immediately comes with a prickling sense of doubt that this happiness can’t possibly last, somehow coupled with a nagging fear that he’s let himself fall into the trap of believing it can. But he shoves that aside. Frisk is still waggling her fingers, her arms splayed out, and her eyes are positively glowing as she beams up at him.

“Hot dogs, huh?” Sans says.

“Real Surface ones!” Frisk drops her arms and comes bounding over to his side. “You haven’t tried them yet and we’ve been here for _months_ and they’re your _favourite_! So today—” she lets out a heavy breath—“I’m making you try them!”

Plain ketchup is Sans’s favourite, closely followed by Toriel’s roast potatoes, but he’s not about to break the kid’s heart by saying as much. 

“Okay,” he says, reaching out to tousle her hair—Frisk, not wanting strands of her hair to become painfully tangled in his phalanges, quickly ducks out of the way. “I’ll _bite_.”

Frisk giggles, but she shakes her head when he fishes out his wallet. “I wanna buy them!”

“Aw, kid. You don’t gotta do that—”

“I want to!” Frisk thrusts her hand into the pocket of her jean shorts and produces a fistful of small change. “Like for a present. I’m really good at saving up my allowance, and they’re not expensive.” She wrinkles her nose. “Way less than what _you_ made me pay for them.”

“Well, those were some gourmet ’dogs. They don’t make them better than that. Quality comes with a price, kid. ’sides, what regular old Surface hot dog vendor’s gonna stack the sausages on your head?”

Frisk giggles again before turning her attention back to the stand. “What toppings are you gonna get?”

“Ketchup.”

“Well, I know _that_. Are you gonna get anything else? They’re really good if you get ketchup and onions and cheese. Ooh! Or with chili. But—” she looks down at the coins in her hand with a frown—“I don’t have enough for those.”

The dejection is plain across her face, as if she’s failing him horribly by not being able to afford a chili dog, and Sans hastens to cheer her up. “Aw, bud, that’s okay. A regular hot dog’s more’n enough. Like, you know, a classic. This is my first time trying a Surface hot dog, y’know. Probably best to start off simple and then level up to the best of the best.”

The kid is chewing at her lip, still looking unsure. Sans gives her a nudge, and she brightens a little bit. “Yeah, okay,” she says. She starts for the hot dog cart—there’s only a human couple ahead of her in line—then turns back to scrutinise him. “Are you _sure_ you only want ketchup on your one?”

“You know me.”

“So boring,” she says, then bounds over to place their order. She comes back a few minutes later with a hot dog in each hand, one spilling over with diced onions and shredded cheese; the other leaking with ketchup. “I made sure you got lots,” she says, handing the ketchup-laden hot dog over to him. There’s so much ketchup that it’s made the bun go soggy and maybe a little limp. Excellent.

“Hot _dog_ ,” he says, and the kid rolls her eyes at him but laughs anyway.

“Ready to try it?” she asks excitedly, and Sans nods.

“On three.”

Frisk leads the countdown—count _up_ , he supposes, since the kid starts from one—and throws in a cheeky two and a half before declaring “three!” and the pair of them bite into their hot dogs at the same time.

“Huh,” Sans says. He tilts his head to the side, chewing thoughtfully, and from the corner of his good eye he catches Frisk watching him very closely. Likely in part because she’s worried he isn’t going to like it, but Sans is pretty sure it’s also because she’s trying to figure out how he eats, being a skeleton and all. Lately she’s made a habit of studying him and Papyrus just a little too close for comfort, as if one of these days she’ll finally be able to catch him and uncover his secrets. But Frisk is just going to have to keep watching, and he is just going to have to learn to tolerate it, because Sans has no idea how he and Papyrus are capable of eating, either. It’s just one of those monster quirks he never had any reason to wonder about until the kid came along. He could always tell her as much, but it’s kind of fun to keep an air of mystery going. Besides, if the kid looks hard enough, she might come up with something to teach him.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Do you like it?” Frisk blurts out, apparently unable to take the suspense any longer. 

“I mean, it’s _good_ ,” says Sans, swiping at crumbs with the back of his sleeve. “It certainly isn’t bad. I’m glad you made me try it. Real Surface hot dogs. But I think I like water sausages better. Who knows, though. Haven’t tried those chili dogs yet.”

Frisk smiles, a little shyly. “I like yours better, too.”


	3. Vocabulary Lesson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **From anon** : _Something with little Sans and Gaster_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one comes with a warning for **psychological abuse and manipulation of a child** , and some good old-fashioned references to **child experimentation**.

Sans didn’t know what time it was, but he had been tossing and turning in bed for nearly an hour, moving his book each time he did so that he wouldn’t accidentally bend the cover as he tried to find a comfortable position in vain. “Comfortable” wasn’t the word for it, really. Comfort was an unreachable idea right now. He just wanted to see if there was a position that would ease total agony into something a little more manageable. His latest administration of DT still hurt from this morning. Sans hadn’t passed out from the pain this time, but that just made it all the more pronounced now.

Reading had been a good distraction. Sans had only started the book this morning—it was a grown-up book, and it took a lot of concentration to read. Sans found that most grown-up books were pretty boring, but he liked the ones about outer space that sometimes came in from the Surface. Whenever intact Surface books were found in the dump—or at one of the various sites around the Underground known for accumulating human trash, since the Temmies usually made the dump difficult to scavenge—monsters were always quick to ensure that the book was carefully copied, printed en masse, and finally sent out to bookstores and libraries across the Underground.

The demand for human media was obvious, and books from the Surface were Sans’s favourite. He loved combing through science books about outer space, even the ones that were hard to read. But adventure stories were his favourite. He liked to read children’s novels about orphans who went on adventures and discovered fantasy lands—being an orphan sounded like it might be cool—but he hadn’t been able to find many books about orphan children travelling to distant planets or outer space. Grown-up stories would just have to do.

The book he was reading now was a little scary, the kind of book that made him grateful he slept with a nightlight, but in a good way. Being scared kept his mind occupied, and the tiny print coupled with the big grown-up words forced him to concentrate very hard. Concentrating didn’t make the pain go away, it never did, but it had made it harder to notice.

But then, just about an hour ago, he’d come across a big word he didn’t know. Usually, when Sans came across a strange new word, he just skipped over it and kept reading—it wasn’t like one stupid word _really_ mattered—but for some reason, this new word felt important. It bothered him not to know it, and so he’d lain awake, tossing and turning as he thought about it and deliberated on what to do. 

Sans rolled his head to one side to look over at Papyrus, still sleeping peacefully in his crib with his thumb in his mouth. Gaster said that soon, Papyrus would be big enough to start working with, but Sans pushed that thought aside, trying to calm himself by watching his baby brother, matching his breaths with his.

It was quiet in their shared bedroom, the edges of the room made soft and gauzy by the nightlight’s gentle glow. But if Sans closed his eyes and listened very closely, he could hear sounds of activity coming from Gaster’s bedroom down the hall. He could hear his creator’s footsteps on the carpeted floor as he paced the small space. He was awake—not that that was any indication of how late it might be. Gaster didn’t run on any kind of a sleep schedule. It seemed stupid that he expected Sans to, especially now, with summer holidays in session.

That settled it. Sans forced himself into a sitting position, then grabbed his book and stood up. His knees were a little wobbly, but he could stand without having to hold onto anything.

He made his way across the room, keeping his steps light so Papyrus wouldn’t wake up—not that he really needed to; skeletons didn’t weigh enough to make the floorboards creak. He was a lot more careful when he opened the door—slowly, slowly, so the hinges wouldn’t squeak—then crept over to Gaster’s room.

Sans paused when he reached the bedroom door, chewing at the end of his pyjama sleeve and shifting from one foot to the other. Then he raised his fist and knocked.

A long silence, drawn out. Sans held his breath, about to give up and return to his bedroom when he heard shuffling noises, and after another moment, the door opened. Gaster stood in its threshold, one hand remaining clasped around the doorknob, wearing a black turtleneck and pyjama pants. He scrutinised Sans a long moment, but he didn’t look angry, just—annoyed. **“It is two o’clock in the morning, Sans,”** he said after a heavy pause. **“You should be asleep.”**

Sans realised he was still chewing on his pyjama sleeve. He dropped his arm. “Can’t sleep. Hurts too much.” More silence. Gaster expected him to elaborate. Sans held up his book. “So I was reading, and I. I wanted to know what a word means. Dictionary’s too high on the shelf to reach,” he added, before Gaster could comment on it.

Gaster stared at him another long moment, then stepped aside, waving his hand in a vaguely invitational gesture. Sans sucked in a breath, then took few steps past the threshold and into Gaster’s room. Standing still like that—even for just a few moments—had left him feeling dizzy, his knees weak, and he felt sure that his legs were seconds away from collapsing underneath him. **“So,”** Gaster remarked, as Sans made his way into the room, **“you chose not to simply move along, and came here for clarification instead? It must have been crucial to understanding the material.”**

Sans dropped to sit at the foot of Gaster’s bed, nodding a little. “It was really bothering me.”

Gaster leaned against his desk, lacing his fingers together and resting his hands on one knee. **“Very well,”** he said after a moment. **“I will take a look in a moment, if you don’t mind waiting. I was concentrating.”**

“’k.”

Gaster nodded, turning back to his work, and Sans watched him for a while as he pushed himself off the desk and began pacing the small space.

“So whatcha working on so late?” asked Sans at length.

Gaster waved at the mess of papers and blueprints half-rolled out that was spread across his desk. **“A pet project of mine.”**

“So nothing about me, then.”

**“No. Nothing that concerns you.”**

“Oh. I thought maybe you were comin’ up with new ways of torturing me.” Sans lowered himself down, not quite collapsing, to lie on his side, rolling over so that he was still facing Gaster.

 **“I would have no reason to do that,”** Gaster murmured, leaning over his desk and flipping through one of his notebooks. **“The Determination Trials have been extremely successful thus far.”**

Sans went quiet for a moment, averting his eyes. He picked at a loose thread poking out from his Gaster’s quilt. “For you, maybe,” he muttered.

A heavy sigh. Sans looked up in time to see Gaster pinching the top of his nasal bone. **“Fine. I suppose I cannot concentrate properly with you in the room, and you have already interrupted me. What is this word that is causing you so much grief?”** In one long stride, he crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed, holding one hand out expectantly.

Sans opened his book to the page he’d dogeared and pointed to the big word as he offered the book to his creator. “That one there.”

Gaster snatched the book up, ignoring the way Sans winced at the sharp movement as his eyes quickly scanned for the word that Sans had pointed to. He raised his browbone. **“Perversion,”** he read aloud, then coughed. **“Well, then. What…. exactly is the context here?”**

“It’s a grown up book. ’s from the Surface.” With some effort, Sans pushed himself up onto his elbows. “I got it at the library. It’s kind of scary, but it’s really cool.” He caught Gaster’s face flash with annoyance and hastily pressed on, trying to explain himself. “It’s about these human scientists that go on an expy-dition to outer space and find new planets to live on ’cause it’s too crowded on the Surface. So, they find this planet, and there’s these super scary aliens that already live there and want to steal the human scientist’s lives and bodies and the human scientists gotta survive and get back to earth. ’cept the aliens can make themselves look like them, and the humans are calling them a pre… um, a per… a that.” 

**“A perversion,”** Gaster repeated, and Sans nodded, sitting up. The nagging sensation he’d felt when he first came across the word was getting worse.

“Yeah.”

Gaster’s eyes bored into him. **“The aliens… unsettle the scientists. Their very existence exudes a profound sense of wrongness. They resemble the humans, but they are not like them really. Nor could they ever be.”**

Gaster gently closed the book and held it out to him, pressing the front and back covers together between both hands, leaving no creases, and Sans silently took it back, hugging it tightly against his chest.

 **“There. Do you understand now?”** Gaster’s words were almost soothing, and Sans felt them deep in his soul.

He nodded once. “Yes. Thanks, Gaster.” He picked at a spot on the book’s spine where the library sticker was losing its adhesive. “I think I’m going back to bed now.”

Gaster dipped his head in acknowledgment, as if agreeing that this was a wise decision, and watched in silence as Sans slowly climbed off the bed—gripping the edge of the mattress for a moment to steady himself—before making his way out of the room and returning to his own chambers, where Papyrus was still blissfully asleep.

Sans shoved the book under his bed and rolled over to face the wall. It still hurt too much to sleep, but he didn’t feel like reading anymore.


	4. The Opposite of an Intervention

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **From leafletp** : _when the monster fam first found out Frisk has nightmares._
> 
> In which I learn I’m really bad at writing for Undyne and Toriel and also group dynamics.

Frisk doesn’t have nightmares all that often. Well, not _every_ night. Usually the dreams are about Asriel. But whenever the bad dreams come, she tends to go to Toriel for comfort— _Mum_ , Frisk always has to remind herself. That part still takes some getting used to, even though Toriel—Mum—keeps insisting Frisk doesn’t have to call her Mum or Mother or any other kind of maternal name if she doesn’t want to. Frisk does want to, though. It’s just a learning process.

She doesn’t ever say anything about the dreams. She doesn’t have to. Frisk just crawls into her mum’s bed and nestles up close to her side, and her mum will shift and pull her in closer, rubbing her back until she falls asleep again. Sometimes Toriel will take her downstairs for a late-night slice of pie with tea or hot chocolate, even though she always makes Frisk change into fresh pyjamas after so she doesn’t bring pie crumbs into bed. It’s nice and safe and warm, and it happens too often, and Frisk is worried that her mum will start to suspect something is wrong.

Over the past few weeks, whenever the bad dreams come, Frisk has put her new monster family members on a rotating schedule. Uncle Papyrus gives the second-best cuddles, so some nights she goes to him, and when she worries she’s been seeking out Papyrus too much, she pays a nighttime visit to Auntie Alphys and Auntie Undyne.

Their bed is covered in so many fluffy anime cushions it’s hard to find the space to lie down. But Frisk always manages. She climbs up onto their big bed and crawls over throw pillows in the shape of Mew Mew’s face, until eventually she reaches Alphys and Undyne and sandwiches herself in between them. Auntie Undyne usually noogies her too hard, but Auntie Alphys is always warm and sort of squishy and gives great cuddles.

Probably she could go to Dunkle Sans, too, but he shares a room with Papyrus and sometimes he doesn’t sleep too good. In either case, the point is that she can’t climb into his bed to evade suspicion. She’s climbed in with Uncle Papyrus when the skeleton brothers are sharing a bed, though. Dunkle Sans gives good cuddles too, and usually he tells her puns that make her laugh and make Uncle Papyrus scream in protest, and that’s more than enough to make her forget any strange bad dreams about the one monster she couldn’t save.

It’s really a good system. Masterfully designed, as Papyrus would say, and he’d probably throw in some more big words, too. Frisk is inclined to feel pretty proud of herself. If she sticks to the rotating schedule, she can continue seeking comfort from her monster family, instead of waking up frightened and shaken and lying there alone in the dark, steeping in guilt that’s too much for her eight-year-old heart to handle.

And most importantly, she can keep anyone from worrying about her too much. 

It’s an excellent, brilliant, stupendous, astounding, masterfully designed system, crafted with almost as much expertise as the Great Papyrus is capable of. Except there’s one thing Frisk doesn’t account for, and she finds about the flaw in her excellent, brilliant, stupendous, astounding, masterfully designed system when she comes downstairs one Saturday after sleeping in too late.

Mealtimes are always a chaotic affair, breakfasts especially. So it might not be strange to see a stack of pancakes on the kitchen table, paired with a tray of fruit and a little pitcher of syrup, and glasses of milk stationed at every seat. But it’s definitely strange to see all five of her monster family members seated around said table. Calmly and quietly, discussing things in lowered voices, not a spear or flying bone or randomly manifesting meddling canine in sight.

Frisk stops halfway down the stairs. She tilts her head to the side and narrows her eyes, surveying the scene with suspicion. “Morning,” she says, wary.

Everyone’s heads snap up; they don’t exactly jump.

Her mum speaks up first. “Good morning, my child,” she says, just as the coffee machine beeps. She stands and begins to pour freshly brewed coffee for everyone but Frisk. There’s a strange quiet as Frisk resumes trotting down the stairs.

“What’s going on?” she asks, taking her place at the table just as Toriel begins piling her plate with grapes and strawberries and wedges of watermelon. Her mum always make her eat her fruit first.

“We were hoping to have a family discussion over breakfast,” her mum explains, after a pause. Weighing her words. “I hope we haven’t made you feel uncomfortable—I thought it would be more natural over a meal as opposed to gathering in a circle in the living room or something clinical like that, but it’s true that this isn’t exactly what we’re used to, and… oh, dear…” She trails off, biting her lip and somehow managing to shoot a pointed look at Undyne and Papyrus even with the concern that’s plain across her features. Undyne and Papyrus look appropriately cowed. Sans snickers. “Well, I just hope you don’t feel we’ve put you on the spot too much.”

“Yeah, but we’ve gotta talk about it sometime, right, Toriel?” Undyne snatches a grape from Alphys’s plate and tosses it in the air to catch it in her mouth. “It’s just that we’ve all been talking, and we’re getting a little worried about you, Frisk.”

Papyrus cuts in, one finger raised in declaration and his other hand splayed across his chest. “So, tiny human… WE ARE STAGING AN INTERVENTION!”

Sans leans across the table to nudge him, frowning. “I don’t think that’s what an intervention is, bro. The kid ain’t done anything _wrong_ —”

“Of course not! After all, THE TINY HUMAN IS VERY GREAT AND COOL! But! Even with all that greatness and coolness we must STAGE AN INTERVENTION ON HER BAD DREAMS!”

Frisk freezes, but the brothers just continue their exchange, and the rest of the family lets them carry on without interruption even though their conversation isn’t getting them anywhere, and they’re behaving as if they’re the only ones in the room. Sans and Papyrus do that a lot. Right now, Sans’s brow is furrowed and he stokes his chin as he genuinely ponders what Papyrus has just said.

“I dunno, bro. I don’t think we can really do anything to _stop_ her bad dreams. We’re just having a talk about them, letting the kid know she don’t gotta hide anything, and that we got her back, y’know? Family support and the whole shebang.”

“Hmm… that is true. As DEEP as the RIVERS OF MY GREATNESS RUN, their rushing currents cannot seem to get past the IMMOVABLE DAM of NIGHTMARES and DAYMARES and even DAYDREAMMARES! But no matter! We are staging THE OPPOSITE OF AN INTERVENTION!”

Sans settles back in his chair, shrugging. “Yeah, that works.”

Frisk smiles weakly, but there’s a twisting feeling in her gut. She bites down on her thumbnail, glancing from one family member to another. “You know about my dreams?”

Everyone’s attention snaps back to her, and Frisk squirms in her seat, feeling decidedly pinned down. She wishes Papyrus would say something to hog the spotlight. Usually he’s good at that, but everyone seems intent on giving her all their attention. Frisk isn’t used to attention. Not like this anyway. It makes her feel like she’s done something wrong, and she has somehow, hasn’t she?

As if to prove a point, her mum scoops more fruit onto her plate, even though Frisk hasn’t touched her food yet, then reaches over the table and gives her hand a gentle squeeze. It’s a nice feeling, and Frisk relaxes just a little. 

“It’s something we had been hoping to talk about, my child,” her mum says, and when Frisk peeks up at her, she finds that her eyes are as warm and gentle as her voice. “It’s just as Undyne said, and as Sans said. That we’re here for you, as your family. And that there is something you wish to talk to us about… that we are here to listen. That we are _always_ here to listen. And you should not feel as if you have to hide your night terrors from us.”

“Y-yeah!” Alphys adds, speaking up for the first time. “We’re a family! Which, um, Toriel a-already said. But! The point is, you don’t need to keep secrets from us. Okay, Frisk?”

Frisk glances between her family members. All of them are looking at her encouragingly, earnest expressions of love. It’s obvious they’ve planned this carefully; nobody’s talking over each other and Sans isn’t making puns and Undyne isn’t leaping across the table to trap her in a head lock give her an affectionate noogie. They’ve discussed it beforehand. Discussed her. Her and her bad dreams.

She selects a grape and begins picking at its peel with the edge of her thumbnail, just for something to do with her hands. “You guys weren’t supposed to know about that,” she mumbles. “I had a _system_ and _everything._ ”

“Yeah, you weren’t fooling anyone, kid,” Sans deadpans, not quite apologetically.

“Besides!” Undyne adds. “If we _talk_ about this stuff, together, and you open up, we can move onto the next step—kicking those dreams in the a—in the butt from here til next Tuesday! And then sprint over to next Tuesday to catch up and _crush them to bits before they can even get up_! Ngahh!”

“PRECISELY SO! Such are the forces behind the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP! NYEH HEH HEH!”

“Hell yeah!” Undyne yells, slamming both fists down on the table and knocking over the pitcher of syrup and two mugs of coffee. Several pieces of cutlery go flying in the air.

“So, Frisk…” Alphys rescues the pitcher of syrup while Sans snatches up the knives with blue magic and lowers them gently down to the table before they can embed themselves in somebody’s skull, earning him a grateful look from Toriel. “You don’t need to feel like you have to keep things from us, o-okay? Keeping w-whatever’s bothering you all, all bottled up inside doesn’t help, but opening up really does. I-I know that now, aheh. You showed me that, remember? So, so trust me from personal experience?”

Frisk follows the conversation, declarations of love and support ping-ponging around the breakfast table, staring down at her fruit and pancakes. They don’t get it. She knows all this stuff about family and friendship and supporting one another. But a whole family meeting, an opposite-intervention, all this fuss over something as insignificant as bad dreams? She’s not a baby, and she knows bad dreams can’t hurt her really. It’s… embarrassing, and it’s awkward, and the whole thing feels like a waste of time.

“I dunno,” she says, to summarise.

There’s a moment of quiet, and she feels her mum’s paw slide away only to be replaced by a longer, slimmer hand, made of bone covered in a cotton glove. “You don’t have to feel ASHAMED for having bad dreams,” Papyrus says. His voice is uncharacteristically soft, but still his words carry a kind of weight, a certainty impossible to ignore. “They do not make you weak, or a burden.” One thumb rubs circles over the top of Frisk’s hand, and his touch says what words can’t capture, can’t really make Frisk believe.

There’s a look on Papyrus’s face that she isn’t sure she’s ever seen there before. Not directed at her, anyway. But Frisk thinks she’s seen him look at his older brother that way before. She thinks, fleetingly, of the nightmares Sans has every once in a while, the ones he pretends don’t exist. She thinks of the nights she’s heard him screaming, hyperventilating, and then she thinks of how Papyrus holds him afterward, close and tight to his broad chest until the shaking subsides and he falls back asleep. She thinks of how many nights she’s stood unnoticed in the doorway and watched the same scene unfold, curious and worried and a little afraid. Papyrus doesn’t think his brother is a burden, Frisk can tell. Sans seems to think so, though, and maybe that’s why he keeps so many secrets of his own.

It puts things into perspective, a little. And maybe Papyrus has known that all along. He understands things that way.

She smiles and shrugs. She says, “I guess so. Okay. Thanks, Uncle Papyrus.”

Her family members are all smiling, too, and Undyne’s slick, scale-covered hand covers Papyrus’s. She grins at Frisk, the only way Undyne knows how to grin, all teeth and all heart. “So what do you say, punk? Ready to open up about those dreams, savage our way through layers of dream muscle tissue and dream organs and crush dream bones in two—” Sans and Papyrus both flinch—“until we can tear right into the heart of what’s been eating at you—”

“Perhaps not quite so much passion is necessary in this situation, Undyne, dear,” her mum cuts in quickly. “There’s no need to rush in and put Frisk under so much pressure. We can just take things slowly. She might not feel quite ready to share everything there is to say about her dreams just yet.”

Frisk is feeling lighter already, but she nods a little in agreement. “Um. Yeah. I don’t know if I really wanna talk about what happens in the dreams right now.” _Or ever,_ she thinks. _But this much is okay. This much is nice._

“Of course, my child.”

“Oh, yeah! For sure!” Undyne makes to squeeze Frisk’s hand, but with Papyrus’s laid on top of it, he gets the worst of her grip, and makes a little choked noise even as Undyne pulls away and flops back into her seat. “Accepting support’s a big, important step too, you know. Like… piercing the skin. Enough to draw a little blood, even.”

“Hear, hear,” says Sans, and Papyrus doesn’t side-eye him or make comments about the pot and the kettle. This is about Frisk, after all. They’re here _for_ Frisk, and she thinks she’s starting to get used to that. It’s a learning process.


	5. A Celebration to Being Losers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> __  
> **From anon** : If you're cool with it, how about a little drabble of Sans and Alphys being bros and watching anime together or something? Love you dude   
> 
> 
> Aww, thank you, anon!! Love you too!This probably isn’t quite what you asked for, and there were a few more smatterings of angst sprinkled in than I originally intended, but this is just kind of how it turned out, so I really hope you still like it!! (Especially after this hell of a wait, I am so sorry, mysterious reader). 
> 
> Light warnings for this one, with some **depictions of implied PTSD.**

Alphys was distracted.

Not that that was unusual: for her, distraction seemed to be a permanent state of being. Especially when they were working.

Three months had passed since Sans had come to her, asking for help completing the machine, and yet they’d made next to no progress.

It wasn’t entirely her fault. Even with half of the work done for them, successfully completing a machine that could detect the presence of an anomaly in the Underground was never going to be an easy endeavour. It had taken Gaster years to finish as much as he did, even if the machine had only been a pet project, even though it hadn’t received as much attention as his... other experiments.

It didn’t help that Gaster’s blueprints and lab notes were nigh impossible to read, and not just because many of them had never been translated from Wingdings. Sans could read Wingdings with only a little effort, but even his proficiency in fonts couldn’t help him decipher Gaster’s notes. His creator hadn’t been disorganised, not like Alphys was—in fact, he’d been extremely efficient—but he’d been organised in a way that had made sense to _him_ , and not really anyone else. Sometimes important calculations and footnotes were scrawled in the margins, mixed in with reminders to buy milk on his way home from the labs, and sometimes there were places where he’d started a string of calculations in one notebook, stopped midway through, and completed them in a second notebook that took Alphys almost a week to find in the Royal Archives. The work was challenging, frustrating, and time-consuming—and completing work on the anomaly detector wasn’t even Alphys’s job. She was doing Sans a favour.

So, no. It wasn’t completely Alphys’s fault that they’d completed so little work on the machine. But at a certain point, Sans had to admit that it was partially because Alphys was almost impossible to work with efficiently. 

Under ordinary circumstances, Sans thought he might have been annoyed, frustrated, and more than a little impatient—a rare feeling for him. It was desperation that had driven him to ask Alphys for her help, and it had called for a _lot_ of desperation to bring him to the Hotland labs.

Sans _was_ desperate, and impatient, and afraid, on top of it all he was overwhelmingly curious. Not knowing who or what the anomaly was, not knowing what it wanted—and all the while knowing that, if only he could complete work on the machine, he _could_ know—was maddening. He _needed_ to get Gaster’s anomaly detector up and running, and Alphys’s lack of concentration wasn’t making his life any easier.

And yet, somehow, confoundingly, he found that he wasn’t really that upset. 

Right now, Sans was sitting cross-legged on the ground floor of Alphys’s Hotland lab, surrounded by a mess of electrical cords and screwdrivers as he rewired the machine’s motherboard, comparing his work to what Gaster had laid out in the blueprints. It was miserable work, too. He kept having to disentangle the wires from between his joints, and he could just _tell_ that one of the cords had gotten stuck behind his patella. He kept dragging a whole sheet of metal with him every time he shifted his leg. This was why he was a physics guy and not an engineer. Theory never got wires stuck between anyone’s bones.

Meanwhile, across the room at the computer desk, Alphys had finally gotten around to refactoring. Her earlier enthusiasm had caused her to code a spaghetti of else-if statements. Papyrus would have approved, Sans thought dimly, grinning a little to himself.

At least, Alphys was _supposed_ to be refactoring. Sans didn’t have much of a view of her screen from his spot on the floor, and the glare was bad from this angle. Alphys was wearing headphones, though that part wasn’t unusual. She was one of those people who worked better with music. But the last few times Sans had glanced up at her, what he _could_ make out decidedly did not resemble code. And he was pretty sure that even for someone who enjoyed coding like Alphys did, refactoring didn’t cause incessant giggling and what sounded a little like hyperventilating.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god… can’t you tell that he likes you, just _kiss_ already, oh my goddd….” 

Sans looked up. Alphys ’s voice was slightly muffled from having clapped her hands over her mouth, and her feet and tail were twitching happily in the air.

“Uh… Al?”

But she couldn’t hear him with her headphones on.

Sans looked around for something he could throw without hurting her, but there was nothing within reach. He settled for yanking off one of his fuzzy house slippers instead, and lobbed it at her. The slipper bounced off one of her headspikes, and Alphys shrieked and jumped about a foot in the air while still seated.

“O-oh my god! I—I mean, I!” Alphys tore her headphones off, leaving them to clatter to the tiled floor as she buried her face in her hands, going bright red. “S-sorry! I was just tired, I mean! Coding! Coding very hard! And I took a break, a-and it was just one episode b-but then I couldn’t stop watching, this is so embarrassing oh my _god_ you must think I’m s-such an idiot, I’m sorry—” She ground her teeth, then peeked up, somehow managing to glare at him out between her fingers. “And don’t _scare_ me like that!”

“Uh. Sorry.” Sans scratched at the back of his skull, oddly sheepish. He shifted to squint at her screen, leaning on one elbow. The sheet of metal he was stuck to made a horrendous screeching noise against the tile as he straightened his legs out. “Watching TV, huh? Is it that Kissing Meow Meow show with the anime in it, or whatever you call it?”

“Mew Mew Kissy Cutie,” Alphys muttered sullenly, bending over to retrieve her headphones. “And no. I-I mean! Yes, it’s an anime, b-but not Mew Mew this time. I’m watching, um, it’s Osaka Swim Club, I mean i-it’s about an all-boy’s swim club in Osaka, which I _think_ is a city on the Surface. I found the cassette tape at the dump so I m-modified an adapter to play it on my computer screen since I don’t have a VCR player, a-and I guess that part’s not so important, but anyway _I just can’t stop watching it_ , it’s this high school anime and the main character is this sophomore boy named Kaito who’s n-not very good at swimming but his friend—”

Sans raised his browbone. There was more than one anime?

Alphys noticed his expression and abruptly cut herself off. “A-anyway, sorry, I don’t want to ramble, I know I do that too much, aheh. Ugh, I suck at this. I-I was supposed to be refactoring—”

“I mean,” Sans offered, and coughed, suddenly awkward. “We don’t _have_ to work, y’know. You’re the one doing _me_ a favour here. You don’t gotta do any of this, or work on the machine when you ain’t up for it. You have responsibilities, a _job_. ’sides,” he added, tilting his head to one side with a grin, “I can respect a good slacking off.”

Alphys snorted, then looked down at him, biting her lip. “Thanks, but um. A-are you sure? This was… p-pretty important to you, you said, and i-it’s not like I’m actually. Doing that much, to be honest? I mean, I kind of just s-sit around eating ice cream and w-watching anime all day anyway—I’m such anime trash—only I do it in my pyjamas so it’s even _less_ professional. Mostly I just tend to paperwork a-and sometimes overseeing CORE maintenance, but. There’s a whole team of workers who already do that, so I’m not really needed, aheh.”

“Eh.” Sans shrugged. “The anomaly ain’t gonna—I mean, it isn’t going to show up in the Underground in the next hour.” _Probably._ “Doesn’t really make a difference if we get a little more work done today or tomorrow. So why not?”

Alphys was twiddling her claws, together, still working at her lip, but her expression brightened just a little. “You r-really don’t mind? Because i-it’s just that I can get, um, kind of excited! When I’m watching anime! And probably pretty annoying, aheh… So I’d get it if you’re, um, just trying to be nice or polite or whatever.”

Sans appraised her a moment, his head still canted to one side. Weirdly, she was reminding him of Papyrus, just a little bit. She was just a lot more upfront about it, which was also weird, because upfront was kind of Papyrus’s thing. “Nah,” he said.

For the first time, Alphys seemed to relax, even letting out a little breath of relief. “Th-that…. Okay! This is gonna be…. I mean! I-I have a lot of snacks s-so we can make it a real… yeah! Um, d-do you want to… I mean! We might be kind of cramped over here, and the TV is downstairs, but I don’t want to force—well, it’s just that y-you don’t like to go down there, right?”

“Yeah,” Sans said. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d uh, _really_ rather not.”

“Basements. Right.” Alphys repeated what Sans had told her the first day they’d met up. She nodded in almost excessive sympathy, and a part of him wondered if she thought it was pathetic, him being scared of going down into basements like a babybones. Possibly not; Alphys wasn’t the judgemental type.

But she also wouldn’t be wrong. It _was_ pathetic, how the mere thought of the lower labs was enough to freeze him up, send his mind reeling until he no longer knew what thoughts he could trust. It was just a place, after all, and _he_ was long gone. It was just a place. Just a cluster of corridors and rooms that probably still smelled of cheap lemony floor cleaner and antiseptic. Air choked with bad memories he could never seem to shake. Sans didn’t know what he would do if he found himself back in the lower labs again. He just knew that he _couldn’t_ go back, knew it on the same fundamental instinct that told him not to touch the stove when the burner was on.

“Yeah,” was all he said, and the look that Alphys gave him was sort of curious, scrutinising.

“W-we could go upstairs?” Alphys offered. “My room isn’t, um, m-much yet, I’ve been kind of lazy s-settling in since I started here, but I could bring up the episode on my laptop and we could sit and watch it on my bed to? N-not like that!” she added, springing up from her seat so quickly it was a wonder she didn’t miss the ground and keel over. “I just meant! T-totally! Platonic! Bed sitting! In a very not romantic way because I don’t hold—not that you’re not attractive, or I mean, u-unattractive, I mean, not that I wouldn’t, I mean! You’re very nice in a lot of ways but that’s not, um, r-relevant right now because w-we’re just going to sit and watch anime! As fr—I mean, platonically! Yeah!”

Sans grinned at her, and it was incredible how he could almost _feel_ the tension seeping out of his bones. It wasn’t the first time Alphys had gotten like this around him. If it had been any other monster, Sans was sure he’d be uncomfortable—he was a lot of things, but attractive definitively wasn’t one of them. In the three months since he’d met her, it had become obvious Alphys just kind of worked like that, and Sans knew not to take it personally. It was sort of endearing, actually.

“You mentioned snacks?” he asked. “Pretty sure Paps was gonna go spy on the Royal Guard training after school today, and if that happens he ain’t gonna be back ’til late. I got all day, basically. Might as well make a real occasion of it. Hanging out on your bed watching anime. You know, totally platonically.” Sans grinned and winked at her, just for the hell of it.

Alphys turned predictably, violently red. “I-I’ll go—the snacks are downstairs so you can just m-make yourself comfortable. There’s a whole shelf of anime and manga—um, that’s kind of like comic books which are books, so! You couldn’t really fit them in the DVD drive! And y-you know what a book is, so I don’t really need to… clarify that… Anyway! There’s a shelf! With DVDs on it! I have a whole collection so you can just pick out anything you want, I’ve seen pretty much all of it. J-just! Don’t pick the s-second season of Mew Mew Kissy Cutie because—n-not that you’d watch the second season before the first season _anyway_ , that wouldn’t even make sense, but the second season is _terrible_ so… Anyway, yeah! My room’s just up there, sorry, don’t mind the mess—” She gestured vaguely at the escalator on the other side of the room, then spun on her heel and scurried to the elevator leading to the lower labs.

Sans watched her go, turning back to the blueprint he’d been examining. He sighed, shoving the blueprint aside before he got to work at disentangling the mess of wires from under his kneecap. He made a mental note not to wear shorts next time he came to Alphys’s. Then he made a mental note to find out if he owned any pants that weren’t shorts.

Once his kneecap was free, Sans forced himself to stand up, rubbing at the spots where his bones were sore from sitting on the hard floor for too long, and made his way over to the escalator, leaving the blueprints and pieces of the machine on the ground. Under ordinary circumstances he would have just teleported upstairs, but he’d never been up to Alphys’s room before, and he needed to be able to envision a place to take a shortcut.

Alphys’s bedroom wasn’t much of one—there was a bookshelf greeting him at the landing, spilling over with books and DVDs and an array of colourful action figures. A narrow wardrobe was shoved up against one wall, and there was a small folding cot that for some reason was sitting smack in the middle of the room. Apart from that, though, the space was a mess of scientific equipment, tangles of wires, stacks of papers, as well as flattened pizza boxes, instant noodle packages, and empty soda cans.

Sans grinned. This was just like Alphys.

He wandered around the room, taking it all in, before circling back to the bookshelf. There were a couple of science books, but for the most part it looked to be comics—manga, Alphys had called it. Most of the spines were written in strange characters that Sans had never seen before. They weren’t just an unusual font, this must be an entirely different _language_. A testament how big the Surface was, he supposed. Sans knew objectively that humans were spread out across the Surface, had developed their own cultures and languages and kinds of food. He’d read about it in one of the children’s encyclopaedias that had washed up at the dump, a long time ago. But _seeing_ another language, written out like that and entirely indecipherable, was another thing altogether.

He wondered if this was what it was like for Alphys, when she saw Gaster’s old documents written out in Wingdings.

“O-okay! All set!” Sans jumped at the sound of her voice, coming from directly behind him. He spun to see her standing at the top of the escalator, laden down with bags of popato chisps and soda cans and boxes of instant noodles. When Alphys realised she’d startled him, her face split into something of a smug grin.

It wasn’t every day that Sans was startled. Usually _he_ was the one popping up behind other monsters and scaring them out of their wits. The only monsters who _didn’t_ cry out or gasp or jump a foot in the air Papyrus and a small handful of the Grillby’s regulars. But Sans teleported behind Alphys all the time. She gave some of the best reactions. Now, it seemed, she was thrilling in the opportunity for revenge, even if she hadn’t set out for it. 

“Very nice,” Sans said, before she could gloat too much. He grabbed one of the comic books off the shelf and showed it to her. “So, uh. I was browsing your anime library here. Manga. These are pretty cool. It’s written in a Surface language, right?”

“Oh!” Alphys stood up a little straighter, her eyes lighting up, toothy grin widening. “Y-yeah! It’s, um, I think it’s called Japanese? They have… a lot of different languages on the Surface, aheh. It must be so _big…_ Anyway, I-I’ve been um—oh my god, you’re gonna think I’m such a dork—but I’ve been, um… Well, I can read it! Kind of! I just mean I’ve been k-kind of teaching it? To myself? I only know a little bit so far, though.”

Sans whistled appreciatively, and Alphys smiled again, just a little bit. They stood there in silence for a moment, Alphys with a load of snacks still cradled in her arms, Sans turning the book over in his hands as he examined the illustration of a catgirl in a frilly pink dress adorning the front and back covers. It wasn’t quite an awkward silence, but it was uncertain and fumbling and itching to be filled. Sans wasn’t used to silences—he liked being alone and having time to think, and he relished in the peace of Snowdin Town, but when he was around other people, he craved conversation and laughter and the warmth of good company. Papyrus was good for that—there was never a peaceful moment when his brother was around—and he loved days at Grillby’s, being surrounded by the regulars, for the same reason. Sans wasn’t get anxious or nervous around other people, but silences still felt empty and uncertain.

He was relieved, then, when Alphys burst out asking him if he’d picked an anime to watch from her collection—she must not be a fan of silences, either. It made sense, knowing her.

The catch, unfortunately, was that Sans never _had_ picked out a show to watch, but he wasn’t about to disappoint Alphys saying as much. “Uh, yeah,” he said, putting down the comic about the Japanese catgirl and grabbing the closest DVD case in reach without looking at it. “I thought--this one looked pretty cool.”

“Ooh!” Alphys moved to make a grab for it, then seemed to register she was still holding the snacks, and she took a step back, letting out a self-conscious sort of giggle. Sans nodded over to her bed, and Alphys bobbed her head up and down with enthusiasm, scampering over to set the snacks down and resuming her chatter as she did so. “Y-yeah, that’s a really good choice! I can see why you’d wanna watch that one, I should have thought about it from the start, oh my god…”

Only now did Sans glance down at the DVD in his hands. There was a drawing of four humans on the cover, dressed in some kind of uniform, two of them toting giant ray guns similar to the kind Sans had seen in the sci-fi comics he himself loved. The humans were maintaining dramatic poses in front of an outer space background.

He grinned wide.

Ah. So that was what Alphys had meant when she’d said she could tell why he’d chosen this show.

Sans joined Alphys on the edge of her bed, where she was booting up her laptop. She’d already torn open one of the bags of popato chisps, and she was munching on them, spilling crumbs and grains of coarse salt all over her keyboard. She wordlessly passed the chips over to Sans, who wasted no time in grabbing a handful and shoving the chisps into his mouth.

Alphys took the DVD case from him, but before she cracked it open, she hesitated, her eyes sliding over to him. She was biting her lip again. “Okay, um. Last chance. I just wanted to check… you’re _sure_ you don’t mind watching with me? Because I _know_ I can get—I mean, I said this already so I don’t know why… ” Alphys physically winced. “N-no, I know. You said you wanted to already, a-and I know you mean it, I just… um, c-can I confess something?”

It was the same thing she’d asked him when they first met, when he’d shown up at her lab asking for an impossible, outrageous favour.

Now, Sans watched her a moment, canting his head to the side. “Shoot,” he said, after a pause.

Alphys relaxed visibly. “This is p-probably dumb, but… um, I-I know this is kind of, I don’t know, I guess you’d call it a-a business relationship? Like it’s not an _a-actual_ business relationship because it’s informal and neither of us hired each other or anything, and the machine doesn’t actually have anything to do with my job, but um… l-like I know we’re supposed to be working on something, and I still want to help! Th-that’s not what I’m trying to insinuate. It’s just that, um… ” She was twiddling her thumbs again, peering over at Sans as if asking for making sure it was alright for her to continue. He nodded once, solemnly, and looking encouraged, Alphys pressed on. “I just, um… I. R-really like just. Hanging out with you. It’s nice just… w-working on the machine, and talking, and um, th-that time we got drinks after in New Home was p-pretty nice too. You’re… you’re really good company, Sans. A-and I know just watching some anime space opera with me m-might not seem like a lot, but, um. Like I said. Say a lot, I guess. That I worry all the time about being annoying, so… yeah! I just… y-yeah.”

Sans went quiet for a moment, thinking. When he spoke, the words felt strange, as though he were listening to someone else saying them, and it hit him that Alphys was the first person he’d ever… _comforted_ that wasn’t his brother. Weird. Weirder still was how genuine his words were. “Yeah,” Sans said, making a _tch_ noise. “I like workin’ with you, too. And, uh. Listen. You don’t gotta worry about being annoying around me, or any of that stuff. You’re… you’re good. And it’s kinda cool, hearing you rant. ’sides, I’m a huge dork, too, right? I mean, you’re talking to the loser of a monster who stuck to this nerdy science shit just for the hell of it, even though he never finished the fifth grade.”

He nudged her gently, and Alphys nodded once, firm and resolute, letting out a whoosh of breath. “Thanks,” she said. “I… I think I needed that.” With another nod, she opened the DVD case and popped it into her laptop’s disc drive. “H-here goes. I hope—I mean, you’re gonna love it.”

“You might make anime trash out of me yet.” Sans helped himself to another handful of chisps. “And don’t worry, I’m not gonna mind if you get too _animated_ while watching,” he said, and then dodged the soda can Alphys threw at his head.


End file.
